Critical Instruction, Critical Learning, and Critical Literacy

Mission

This site is headquarters for the movement to professionalize instructional practice in schools and colleges. This means transforming the teaching profession from the conventional practice of weak roteism instruction to rigorous critical instruction pedagogy.

Dr. Maiorana is leading a world-wide campaign to minimize the practice of roteism instruction. Such instruction is self-defeating for teachers and students because it inherently precludes comprehension of subject matter and critical literacy development. Why? Roteism provides no mental process for thinking, reading, and writing critically. Roteism instruction continues to define the profession. It is the basis for teacher education, school and college classroom practice, andtextbook writing. In today’s fast-moving, conflicted, and digital society continued reliance on roteism instruction as the main basis for teaching and learning in school and college classrooms is a direct threat to rational discourse, freedom, and democracy.

Dr. Maiorana’s work is distinguished by his origination of the conceptual, developmental, and procedural means of a core body of knowledge for critical instruction. This core – long missing from teacher education, school and college classroom practice, and textbook writing – includes the means to gain comprehension of new and revisited subject matter while simultaneously developing in teachers and students the ability to think, read, and write critically. In all of teaching time, this is the first time such simultaneity has been achieved. Such a core body of knowledge for critical instruction has never before existed in the world’s long history of teaching and learning.

The unique concept that supports the mission is the human beings’ innate, critical, and informal grammar of mind for how the mind thinks and learns when engaging the world and its subject matter. The formalization of this natural grammar of mind is called mind grammar-based critical instruction for engaging subject matter or simply, critical instruction.

Roteism: The Root Issue of Why Instructional Preparation and Practice is Inherently Weak

Imagine the following. A group of people have gathered to launch a profession. The profession is to be called teaching. Teachers will lead students to learn the world’s subject matter through thinking, reading, writing and discussion.

Someone asks, “On what basis should we base our practice; that is, how will we lead students mentally when discussing subject matter?

If educators had set out to select the most boring, intellectually bitter, least motivating way to teach and learn subject matter, then we could hardly have done worse than to choose roteism, the mentally serial, static, crystallized, one-dimensional, rote-inducing, literacy-defeating approach to subject matter on which the profession continues to base its practice of subject matter.

Roteism practice denies who we are as humans; humans who have an innate and informal grammar of mind, the gift of a natural science of mind, to engage the world and its subject matter critically. The mind wants to learn critically, but the profession does not teach like the mind learns. We do not explain new and revisited subject matter critically based on the use of critically explicit reasoning processes.

Roteism practice is not based on a critical reasoning process. It provides the profession with no means to explain new and rested subject by connecting and integrating a topic’s facts and ideas based on the three defined natural attributes that universally make up all subject matter: subject matter objective, processes, consequences.

Roteism not only induces rote learning, it provides no mental foundation to lead students to develop abilities in critical literacy: thinking, reading, and writing critically.

Critical Instruction and Critical Learning Lead to Critical Literacy

Critical Instruction is the formal and explicit explanation of how to connect and integrate the facts and ideas within the objectives, processes and consequences of subject matter in ways that simultaneously develop literacy abilities in all students to think, read, listen, write, speak, and observe critically.

Critical Learning Critical learning is gaining critical comprehension of content while concurrently developing the ability to think, read, and write critically. Critical learning is the basis for critical instruction and critical literacy.